Montréal Est une Île. Elle Devrait Commencer À Agir Comme une Île.

Montreal is an island, and little in daily life reminds us of it. More than 260 kilometres of shoreline wrap around this city, and yet a Montrealer who wants to swim in the river, or simply drink a coffee within sight of moving water, has almost nowhere to go. Only three public beaches operate on the island—Jean-Doré, Verdun Beach, and Bois-de-l'Île-Bizard—and only the last two are free. These beaches are barely water passages: small, shallow, and soulless thanks to lifeguards ordered to blow their whistles at the first sign of fun. Toronto, which is geographically on a lake as opposed to a river, maintains ten supervised beaches, seven certified to the international Blue Flag standard, all ungated and free, open dawn to midnight, with unsupervised after-hours swimming blissfully permitted.

Our waterfront cafés fare no better. We mean places where, if our fork drops, it might sink into the river. A handful of microscopic clusters—the Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue boardwalk, the Lachine Canal around Old Lachine, a couple of spots in the Old Port—punctuate the shoreline, but even these establishments offer only water views across a vast expanse of land.

This was not always so.

In 1973, the Gazette counted 29 beaches on the island of Montreal. In the 1950s, thousands flocked to Cap-Saint-Jacques and Roxboro on hot summer days. However, due to the city pouring untreated wastewater into its rivers for decades, one by one the beaches closed. Instead of saving them, we condemned them.

The tragedy is that the water largely came back and the access never did. The Fondation Rivières, analyzing 20 years of the city's own sampling data, identified on its website 57 shoreline sites where the water quality is good enough for swimming at least 90 per cent of the time. The obstacles now are of our own making: a stack of well-intentioned rules and land arrangements that wall the island off from its river. The eastern riverfront belongs to the federal port, while much of the rest is private riparian property or municipal parkland where commerce is barely permitted.

Quebec's shoreline-protection regime and newly expanded flood-zone maps make building anything near the water's edge nearly impossible. Any swimming project must clear federal, provincial, and municipal approvals: Verdun's modest beach took five years to open; the east-end Plage de l'Est was stalled by contaminated soil and the habitat of an endangered fish; and Promenade-Bellerive, where residents swim anyway, will wait until at least 2028 for remediation of industrial lead and benzene.